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Why is Chrome so much less graphically performant than Safari?

4 points by Aslan11 ↗ HN
Hey HN,

Front End Developer here, long time reader. I'm trying to identify why Chrome seems to struggle when it comes to animation performance while Safari is able to render everything without a hitch. Is this because Safari has hooks into the OS that Chrome does not? Is this because Google adopted blink in lieu of webkit? And most importantly is there a remedy out there?

Take the following site for example: http://scrollrevealjs.org/

In Chrome my scrolling gets choppy, however everything remains beautifully buttery in Safari. As a developer what can I do to improve the performance of my sites that rely heavily on animation?

Thanks!

4 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] thread
zwiteof
Your example looks fine in chrome for me.
lsllc
It's a known issue, been around since retina MBP was introduced; see:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136555

For me, I have no problems with Chrome when running an rMBP with a external display, but once I switch to the built in retina display, performance suffers significantly.

I switched to Safari a few months ago despite preferring Chrome because I couldn't stand Chrome's poor retina performance.

Sarkie
Try looking at this.

http://jankfree.org/

Chrome has some good tools and even has chrome://tracing to show you low level stuff inside Chrome.